Newt Gingrich: Poor Children Are As Lazy As Their Welfare Grabbing Parents
Newt Gingrich, not backing away from his idea to have poor children whose parents are on welfare take part-time jobs as school janitors, today riled even more people when he announced that he believes that poor children are lazy and don’t know how to work.
That’s right, it’s the poor kids — not the ones with maids and nannies and chauffeurs and tutors and money to spend on restaurants — that don’t know how to work.
“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it is illegal,” Gingrich stated.
Gingrich, who has been attacking child labor laws as “truly stupid,” because there’s apparently nothing wrong with seven-year olds slaving away in sweat shops to earn less than minimum wage as long as he can attract $60,000 for an hour’s speech (let’s see, $60,000 divided by, say, $7 an hour equals…), thinks that children who are poor, whose parents are poor, only know how to work if it involves crime, say, drug-dealing perhaps?
I’m wondering where the stereotypes in Gingrich’s mind of poor, presumably black children ends, and the ones where fat, rich, old, failed, lying hypocrites who are serial adulterers taking America for a ride begin?
 The Huffington Post notes today,
Last month, at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Gingrich called child labor laws “stupid.” “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school,” he said. He repeated the idea on the campaign trail, saying it would be “dramatically less expensive.”‘
Gingrich said Thursday that his previous comments were “spun out of control” by “the left.”
Janitorial work is hardly easy — the Labor Department notes that janitors may “spend most of their time on their feet, sometimes lifting or pushing heavy furniture or equipment. Many tasks, such as dusting or sweeping, require constant bending, stooping, and stretching.”
And Jonathan Capehart of The Washington Post responds to the gross Gingrich gaffe:
That was today, folks! A lot can be said about the plight of families unlucky enough to make $60,000 for a half-hour of bloviation or about their equally unlucky children who are deprived delightful cruises through the Greek isles. But Gingrich’s blanket condemnation of “really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods†is unbelievably disgusting. And its disrespectful of the overwhelming majority of those children and their families who live their lives with far more integrity and far less cash than Gingrich ever will.
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